Xinning is a writer and dancer raised between China and Singapore. She will graduate from Yale College with a double major in Comparative Literature and Cognitive Science in May 2026.
She runs a column for the Singapore-based newspaper Lianhe Zaobao (联合早报) and is the winner of the Seoul Players' 2025 10-Minute Play Festival for directing. Her first play, A Play Named Zhuangzi, was produced by Yale Vermillion Theater in December 2024. She was a speaker at the Singapore Writers' Festival in 2023, and her work has been featured in the Singapore Poetry Anthology. She has worked with Stan Lai's Theatre Above in Shanghai and at the Huichang Theatre Festival (2025). A staged reading of her new play, My Dear Beloved, will be held at Crescent Theater in April 2026.
Playwriting · Theater
Playwriting
Embodying language
2024
A Play Named Zhuangzi
A philosophical romp through Daoism, featuring bromance, humor, and a ghost of an author.
Full lengthProducedYale Vermilion Theater
Synopsis
Dr. Shoelace and Zi You, characters trapped in the classic Daoist text Zhuangzi, are having a rough day. As Dr. Shoelace dutifully recites Zhuangzi’s teachings, following “the Way” begins to sound suspiciously like hopeless determinism. Thus begins Zi You’s quest to live up to her namesake: freedom. But first, a small problem: the Zhuangzi author sits right behind them, watching and writing.
In this meandering journey through the world of Zhuangzi, a philosophical romp plays out with humor, bromance, and a whole lot of ghost metaphors. Take this as “a day in the life of the Zhuangzi”, or a manual on what NOT to do if you wake up in Truman’s world. What if, one day, you could meet the author of your life — and what would you do, if they handed the pen of fate to you?
Produced by Yale Vermilion Theater, December 2024. Supported by Ezra Stiles College Creative & Performing Arts Award and the Asian American Cultural Center.
A father and daughter trapped in a 15-hour flight from home to the dreamland.
BilingualWuzhen Theater Festival
Synopsis
On a long-haul flight from Beijing to New York, a Chinese young woman runs into her father who wanted to surprise her by coming early to attend her upcoming wedding. Unknown to him, the wedding has just been canceled. Unknown to her, he is still grieving a recent loss. Habitually assuring each other that “everything is fine,” the two circle around the truths of their lives, testing and probing each other until the suspended flight cabin forces their unspoken fears out into the open. If one has chosen a life in the liminal time and space of transcontinental flights, where, then, is home?
Bilingual production for the Wuzhen Theater Festival (China) 2025. Directed by: Wisteria Deng Performed by: Wisteria Deng, Meng Wang
Production photos
2021
Who Murdered Shakespeare
Hamlet kills Shakespeare. Now it's truly his turn to be, or not to be.
MandarinDevisedHangzhou
Synopsis
After another sold-out performance of Hamlet, Hamlet sneaks into Shakespeare’s bedroom and murders his author. Now ready to start his life afresh, free, self-made, Hamlet decides to become, in turn, a test-taker that helps others cheat, a businesswoman pressured into marriage, a poor student trapped in unrequited love, and a robot who doubts its own integrity…
“To be or not to be” — that still is the question.
Mandarin production following devised theatre workshops in Hangzhou, China, 2021.
Hazel digs her way through the rubble of a collapsed school building, and an infinite library that holds all possible versions of life.
Full lengthIn development
Synopsis
After witnessing the collapse of a school gym, Hazel finds herself trapped in an infinite library that holds all possible versions of anyone’s life. Unlike the grieving parents searching for an explanation for their children’s senseless deaths, Hazel doesn’t understand why she is here. Time is ticking, though. Those who stay too long in the library risk becoming part of it. Guided by a grumpy, jaded librarian who drinks to forget, Hazel digs through the rubble of memory to find her way out.
In a policeman’s guilty confession, a father’s desperate attempt to cope, and three little girls’ quiet, relentless escape, Hazel begins to unearth her buried past and witness how the stories of her hometown have become her own. The Library of Forgetting is about making sense of life’s nonsensical twists, about how we remember as we let go, and the weight of the past we must carry, and eventually shed.
Initial draft completed 2025.
2026
My Dear Beloved
2041: AI lover bots are optimizing romance, but they've hit a snag: users no longer want sex with them.
ComedyStaged reading
Synopsis
It is the year 2041, the height of the Great Relationship Recession. Most people now live with personalized AI lover bots designed to meet every emotional and physical need. These lover bots are having a KPI compliance crisis, though: users no longer want sex with them.
Tasked to troubleshoot this issue, MILO (they/them), a corporate minion at a love-tech conglomerate, decides to extract data from human clients at True Love Consultancy — a modern-day Hinge service devoted to restoring the ancient tradition of real people dates. MILO starts following W and M, two humans both dissatisfied with their lover bots, in an effort to update lover bots in this battle for their human users’ heart.
Moving through fake dates, genuine fights, and how “proprietary neuro-affective prediction algorithm built on decades of psychological insight” may or may not help us love someone better, My Dear Beloved is a comedic thought experiment to stress-test what lies beneath our pursuit of love: do we want care? unconditional acceptance? the right amount of resistance? Is human relationship really irreplaceable — and if it is, how far are we willing to go just to have the “real” thing?
Online reading held in October, 2025. Staged reading to be held in April, 2026 in Crescent Theater, supported by Ezra Stiles College Creative & Performing Arts Award.
Directing
2025 · Director
Something is Rotting on the Stage of Glenmark
A Hamlet production spirals into farce, when an overeager theater novice literally dies onstage and enters eternal belonging to the stage as the theater's resident ghost.
🏆 2nd Place — Seoul Players 202510-Minute Play Festival
Production Details
Written by Ken Preuss Directed by Xinning Shao Performed by Mark Dorman & Tylah Jarvis
Seoul Players 2025 10-Minute Play Festival · 2nd Place
Blending dramatic writing with literary criticism, this play stages a bar-stool conversation between two (reasonably drunk) literary theorists, Sylvia Wynter and Donna Haraway. By placing theoretical debate into everyday social spaces, the work tests what critical theory can do when it is forced to confront real, lived experiences.
2024
My Friend An Drew
Translation
English translation of Shuang Xuetao 双雪涛’s short story《我的朋友安德烈》.
In progress
Amber
Translation
English translation of Liao Yimei 廖一梅’s play 琥珀.
Let’s play!
Open to commissions, collaborations, conversations.
